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These are our top ten musicals based on real-life people and events that have shaped the theatre.
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Created by writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby in the eponymous Captain America Comics #1, the patriotic hero became a breakout star for Timely Comics.
Barely three years after independence from British colonial rule, Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, collapsed into a civil war.
Between 1946-1948, around 1,500 people in Guatemala—including prisoners, soldiers, prostitutes, psychiatric patients, and children—were enrolled without consent in unethical studies related to the testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections.
In July 1956, the international order was disrupted by the Suez Crisis, a complicated imbroglio marked by the intersection of European decolonization, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Cold War, and the growth of U.S. power.
World War II was a total war—a mobilization of nearly all human and natural resources.
The region of western Ukraine makes up just a small percentage of the territory and population of present-day Ukraine, but has historically played an outsized role in the 20th century struggles for control of eastern Europe.
On July 21, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on an entirely different world.
March 3, 1857 marked the unofficial beginning of the so-called Second Opium War (officially 1856-1860).
Liu Bang rose from obscurity to be crowned emperor of China 2215 years ago on the 28th of February, 202 BCE.
Süleyman, who would be known to the west as “the Magnificent,” began his reign as sultan of the Ottoman Empire in September 1520.
The years 1940–1949 were ones of continuous horror for the Greek people.
December 16, 1971 marked the end of the Bangladesh Liberation War, a short-lived conflict between India and Pakistan.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring shocked the American public when it was published in the summer of 1962.
Architecture is a way of understanding the world: recording its history, sharing its culture, and connecting with people.
Perhaps no historical event illustrates the potential disaster awaiting military forces put in a hopeless strategic situation than the fall of the Philippines in the spring of 1942.
On a summer day in August 1920, in the middle of war, a group of Ukrainians performed Macbeth.
After a brutal 75-day siege, the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan surrendered on August 13, 1521.
Taras Shevchenko is not just the founder of the modern Ukrainian literary language, he is also the most important symbol of modern Ukrainian nationhood.
The decade of war and revolution between 1914 and 1924 is critical for understanding both Russian and Ukrainian statehood up to the present day.
When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917 during World War I, the lands of today’s Ukraine became a battleground of violence and instability until 1922.
Emily Channell-Justice explores the goals and lived experiences of Ukraine’s watershed Euromaidan protests of 2013-14.
On January 1st, 1818, Mary Shelley, at age nineteen, published the gothic novel Frankenstein.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has returned to its pre-revolutionary positin as a major agricultural exporter of key commodities.
The Russian government’s rationale for the war in Ukraine is not about oil, coal, or natural resources. It is about asserting specious historical claims.
On December 2, 1980, four churchwomen—Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan—became victims of escalating violence toward church members who sided with the poor in El Salvador.
In 1919, Eugene Christophe was awarded the first yellow jersey, but he did not win the Tour de France that year.
On September 20, 1519, five ships carrying about 270 men sailed westward from the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
In February-March 1616, the Catholic Church issued a prohibition against the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion.
The atomic age began between heartbeats at 8:15 am on August 6, 1945 when the Japanese city of Hiroshima was leveled by an atomic bomb.
Dmitri Mendeleev's looming publishing deadline resulted in a system that classified all of the chemical elements.
From February 22 to 25, 1986, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos gathered on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue to protest President Ferdinand Marcos' claim that he had won re-election.
On 20 November 1975, Spanish General Francisco Franco died in bed, signaling the unceremonious end of one of Europe’s longest dictatorships.
HIV and COVID-19 have both laid bare that stark racial disparities exist in population health and in access to quality medical care in the US.
In July 1995, over 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
The real origins of the iPhone’s power stems from the pioneering efforts of communication innovators that preceded the AT&T engineers of the 1920s.
In August 1942, the most famous battle of the Second World War began.
How do conspiracy theories of the past compare with current ones?
The Soviet Union tried to minimize news of the HIV/AIDS outbreak, blaming the victims.
Humans have controlled and, at times, eliminated animal populations on the islands.
On August 25th, 1944, Paris was liberated after more than four years of Nazi occupation.
After a devasting fire in Rome in 64 CE, Emperor Nero successfully rebuilt the city.
When it was over, the populations of Europe, China, and India were cut by a third to a half.
Soon after SARS was discovered, labs around the world shared information in search of a cure.
Estimates suggest that this flu claimed as many as 50 million lives around the world between 1918 and 1919.
